Many wireless applications, including wireless sensor applications, are limited in processing speed, storage capacity, and communication bandwidth. Furthermore, because many wireless sensor applications are battery powered, their lifetime is determined by their ability to conserve power. Similarly, other applications such as real-time image and video processing applications suffer from similar limitations as the above-described wireless applications. In particular, real-time image and video processing is generally computationally expensive because a large amount of image and video data must be characterized in essentially real-time. Accordingly, there is a need in the industry for automatic, computationally inexpensive, and/or low-power methods for characterizing a variety of data, including sensor data, image data, and video data.